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To be precise, Russian verbs do not have person marked in the past (which btw results in less frequent pronoun drops in the past then in other forms); but they have gender in singular. We just know that the Latin original phrase is first-person, but without this background пришёл, увидел, победил is 'I-m./you-m./he came,' etc. Ignatus ( talk) 16:06, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
There seems to be quite a lot of this in English, at least in the first person singular, perhaps mainly in slightly informal contexts, like "Don't know much about history, don't know much about biology"; "Will you come to-morrow?" "Can't, I'm afraid"; "Can't pay, won't pay," and so on. Seadowns ( talk) 13:30, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
The article states:
Although Japanese is topic-prominent, sentences definitely don't require an expressed topic to make sense. For one, the topic is always omitted when it is the same as the subject, and in other situations the topic, subject, and object can be, and frequently are omitted entirely, whenever they are expected to be implicitly understood. I will try to reword this section. LeeWilson ( talk) 05:57, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
this article should also include stuff about chomsky and "pro-drop parameter" and "parameter settings in the brain" Bogdan | Talk 19:03, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I think there's considerable overlap (and confusion) between "null subject" and "pro-drop". Modesty aside, I think the coverage of the subject in pro-drop language is fine, though of course this is not exactly the same phenomenon. I'd prefer to see these articles merged into one. In any case, I'm putting this up for attention. -- Pablo D. Flores 14:30, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I agree that this article needs to do a better job explaining the difference between null-subject and pro-drop. As of now, I don't quite get how this is in practice. Also, note that all examples in the article are in fact examples of pro-drop, leaving me wondering what other cases would look like. EldKatt ( Talk) 11:39, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm a Slovenian, and based on my understanding of null subject languages, Slovenian is one too.
Example:
I am eating.
Jem.
You are eating.
Ješ.
The verb agrees with subject in person and number, and if the subject is omitted, the verb itself signifies who is the object (in a given contex).
Compare:
Jaz jem. would mean It is me who is eating. or Moi, je mange. (in French).
It is evident that we don't need both articles. Does anyone see any problems or other issues in merging these two? -- Lambiam Talk 14:14, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
So done. -- Lambiam Talk 05:46, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't know whether Irish should be considered a null subject language or not. In Irish, some finite verb forms are inflected for person and number (synthetic forms), while others aren't and have to have an explicit subject (analytic forms). Using explicit subjects with synthetic forms is ungrammatical. So for example, the 1st person singular present indicative is synthetic: molaim means "I praise", and *molaim mé is ungrammatical (Irish being VSO the verb precedes the subject). But the 3rd person singular present indicative is analytic: molann sé means "he praises" and *molann without an explicit subject is ungrammatical (except in tag questions and as an answer to a question). So what's weird about Irish compared to "canonical" null-subject languages like Portuguese is (1) not all finite verb forms carry person and number information, and those that don't may not have a null subject, and (2) verb forms that do carry person and number information must have a null subject; it isn't optional. — An gr 11:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Mentioning a few diverse null subject languages in the article serves two purposes: (A) to give the reader for who this is a new concept a few examples they might be familiar with; and (B) to illustrate that this feature occurs in widely divergent language families. There are some 2000 null subject languages, and it is pointless to list here as many as possible. Additionally, there is a serious problem of unverifiability. If some user adds, say, Cotoname, who is going to verify this, or, alternatively, challenge this? So I propose to whittle and keep the list down to, say, ten widely known (if only by name) diverse languages. Other viewpoints? -- Lambiam Talk 00:54, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Bah! If you want to have such a cut, you should name language families, and not languages. Velho 04:11, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
I've replaced the text in the article by Ruakh's text, but instead of the absolute number 2000 (which is an undocumented estimate) I've put the vague but unassailable "a considerable part" (of the world's languages). -- Lambiam Talk 04:55, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Why shouldn't we mention that imperative sentences often come without subject?! Velho 23:34, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I've corrected the section which said that the construction "ele está a chover" doesn't exist in portuguese based on: [1] and [2](both links are in portuguese) -- LeRobert 18:06, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
One of those links referred to a very famous Portuguese song. All I wanted to show was that it's perfectly fine to use that construction even if it's not a very common one (maybe that sentence is not a very good example for this article). -- LeRobert 10:57, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
You only very rarely hear that in Portuguese. It's either done for literary purposes, or (perhaps) characteristic of a few dialects. I think it's fair to say that it's not a part of the standard language, and I would not count it as a counterexample, myself. There is no comparison between those examples and English "It rains" or French "Il pleut", where the pronoun is absolutely mandatory. FilipeS 19:34, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
But c'mon! The article shouldn't point to the possibility of "ele" appearing. It looks now as if it was kind of an option or so. Whenever "ele" appears in such constructions, it is always somehow non-standard or even anti-standard. The article isn't giving the right idea! Velho 02:01, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Hear! Hear! -- LeRobert 13:40, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
I've never ever met 'ele está a chover', or actually any instance of 'ele' as the subject of an otherwise impersonal construction in my lifetime as a native speaker and careful observer of the language. There is only 'Ele acontece.../há...' as a fixed expression. I'm willing to admit it might occur in dialectal or archaic usage, of the sort that nobody will ever meet in normal life. The song mentioned uses the fixed and normal, albeit stilted, 'ele há'. 77.54.70.64 ( talk) 17:47, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I am Brazilian and thus a native speaker of Portuguese. I would like to point out that according to Portuguese grammar, the second example (with "It is raining") is not exactly a case of omitted subject, and therefore may not be a case of null subject as defined here. Additionally, there is a good and precise reason why the subject may be omitted in the first example (with "I am going home").
In the first example, "Vou para casa" ("I am going home" - or, literally, "[I] go to [my] house" - there are actually two omitted pronouns in this sentence, one personal and one possessive!), it is simply the very detailed and precise Portuguese verb conjugation, mostly with a different verb form for each person, number and tense combination, that makes the pronoun implicit and redundant.
In other words, there is no way a pronoun other than eu ("I") could be used with vou; so, there is no gain in information content by using the pronoun explicitly (or loss by not using it). Both forms are grammatically correct and it is usually left to the speaker's or writer's preference to use either of them. However, as mentioned in the text, Brazilian Portuguese is indeed more liberal with using explicit pronouns or not than European Portuguese, where emphasis considerations weigh more (here in Brazil, we not only use the pronoun for emphasis, but must use the right voice tone when emphasis is desired - that is, the emphasis itself must be emphasized!). For this very reason, we are taught in school that it is considered more elegant to avoid using explicit subjects whenever possible, especially with eu, because saying "eu, eu, eu" all the time can be interpreted as a sign that the person is a total egocentric...
On the other hand, there are some verbs and tenses where the first and third person singular are conjugated the same way. The same very irregular verb ir ("to go") offers an example in the so-called imperfect past tense: "Eu ia à igreja" ("I used to go to church") and "Ele/ela ia à igreja" ("He/she used to go to church"). In such cases, the speaker or writer is advised to check if there are enough context clues before deciding whether to use an explicit subject or not, because otherwise there may be room for ambiguity sometimes.
However, chover ("to rain") is a completely different case. It is not a case where the subject may be omitted because it is already implicit: chover and other "weather" verbs are a special case of so-called "impersonal defective" verbs, and in their commonest usage (as in "It is raining" - "Está chovendo" in Brazil or "Está a chover" in Portugal), they are only conjugated in the third person singular and syntactically are considered to have no subject at all. That is, the subject is not being omitted - Portuguese grammar considers that it simply does not exist! (There are, however, figurative constructions which may have a subject, and then the verb will be conjugated accordingly; the prestigious Houaiss dictionary gives some examples, such as: "Após o apelo na TV, os donativos choveram." - "After the appeal on TV, donations rained.") With that in mind, is the basic sense of chover a null-subject example as defined by this article? I am not so sure.
I am not very proficient in Spanish, but the two languages are very similar, including much of their grammar, and I believe these same remarks probably apply to Spanish as well (including the case of llover - "to rain").
What do you think? -- UrsoBR ( talk) 11:01, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
Here and in other linguistics articles, constructed languages are over-represented. That a given constructed language has a given characteristic is really irrelevant for most purposes, because it doesn't say anything meaningful about the characteristic (all it says is that the language's constructor thought it a good idea). That said, I feel awkward about removing this content without some sort of discussion first … so, thoughts? — Ruakh TALK 21:16, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I reintroduced part of that section, for the following reasons. First, the section was nearly blanked. I can see devoting less space to one language type than another, but I see no reason to single out one type and nearly obliterate it. Second, the information was removed under the misunderstanding that this section deals with constructed languages and is therefore not meaningful. While Esperanto is considered constructed, Interlingua is considered a naturally occurring language, so it isn't clear to me how it is somehow less meaningful than French or Japanese. In any case, I think it's a big leap from "constructed" to "meaningless", and it seems an overstatement to suggest that including one constructed language is an over-representation. Finally, several officially null-subject languages are included, just not in the auxiliary language section. I've made this clearer in the text. Cal ( talk) 06:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
There is something I want to clarify before I write sections on Hebrew and Arabic. In null subject languages, is it necessary or just optional to omit the subject? I need to know this to finish my section on Hebrew. -- Vgp0012 17:56, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
We need a List of null-subject languages as well as a List of non-null-subject languages. Openodd ( talk) 03:33, 20 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm removing the parenthetical addition from 94.225.100.28 on 30 September, 2011
Since the rest of the article considers verb conjugation to be perfectly compatible with classifying an example as Null-subject, even typical. 94.225.100.28's interpretation makes sense, but doesn't fit with the rest of the article. Aidan ( talk) 19:23, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
What does this bit mean?
There are some words missing, and I'm reading this as
-- which makes no sense. SigPig | SEND - OVER 05:36, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
I do not understand the concept of 'null subject' as explained here at all. In a form such as 'tulissem' it is surely the final grapheme/morpheme that carries the 'subject' information and is every bit as explicit as 'ego', which is quite simply made redundant and need not be added but can be added in some cases for particular effect. In languages where the pronoun information is usually explicitly required, the omission of it (Weiss nicht/Don't know) is possible because the context ensures that it is understood ( Pamour ( talk) 20:35, 24 October 2016 (UTC)).
Taken in account that the text is almost the same those sections could be together. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.123.118.0 ( talk) 21:10, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
“Radical pro-drop is possible only in NP languages.”
What is an NP language? I've searched the Wikipedia and failed. I see a lot of examples about "NP-completeness" in mathematics and computation; they obviously are not relevant. The only linguistic example I find is NP as an abbreviation of "noun phrase" but I can't make sense of that either in this context. — Tonymec ( talk) 14:10, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
In Turkish it is not actually possible to omit the subject. Because the language do extensively make use of possessive suffixes. So you will never ever have to "guess" the subject... [1].
References
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
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To be precise, Russian verbs do not have person marked in the past (which btw results in less frequent pronoun drops in the past then in other forms); but they have gender in singular. We just know that the Latin original phrase is first-person, but without this background пришёл, увидел, победил is 'I-m./you-m./he came,' etc. Ignatus ( talk) 16:06, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
There seems to be quite a lot of this in English, at least in the first person singular, perhaps mainly in slightly informal contexts, like "Don't know much about history, don't know much about biology"; "Will you come to-morrow?" "Can't, I'm afraid"; "Can't pay, won't pay," and so on. Seadowns ( talk) 13:30, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
The article states:
Although Japanese is topic-prominent, sentences definitely don't require an expressed topic to make sense. For one, the topic is always omitted when it is the same as the subject, and in other situations the topic, subject, and object can be, and frequently are omitted entirely, whenever they are expected to be implicitly understood. I will try to reword this section. LeeWilson ( talk) 05:57, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
this article should also include stuff about chomsky and "pro-drop parameter" and "parameter settings in the brain" Bogdan | Talk 19:03, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I think there's considerable overlap (and confusion) between "null subject" and "pro-drop". Modesty aside, I think the coverage of the subject in pro-drop language is fine, though of course this is not exactly the same phenomenon. I'd prefer to see these articles merged into one. In any case, I'm putting this up for attention. -- Pablo D. Flores 14:30, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I agree that this article needs to do a better job explaining the difference between null-subject and pro-drop. As of now, I don't quite get how this is in practice. Also, note that all examples in the article are in fact examples of pro-drop, leaving me wondering what other cases would look like. EldKatt ( Talk) 11:39, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm a Slovenian, and based on my understanding of null subject languages, Slovenian is one too.
Example:
I am eating.
Jem.
You are eating.
Ješ.
The verb agrees with subject in person and number, and if the subject is omitted, the verb itself signifies who is the object (in a given contex).
Compare:
Jaz jem. would mean It is me who is eating. or Moi, je mange. (in French).
It is evident that we don't need both articles. Does anyone see any problems or other issues in merging these two? -- Lambiam Talk 14:14, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
So done. -- Lambiam Talk 05:46, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't know whether Irish should be considered a null subject language or not. In Irish, some finite verb forms are inflected for person and number (synthetic forms), while others aren't and have to have an explicit subject (analytic forms). Using explicit subjects with synthetic forms is ungrammatical. So for example, the 1st person singular present indicative is synthetic: molaim means "I praise", and *molaim mé is ungrammatical (Irish being VSO the verb precedes the subject). But the 3rd person singular present indicative is analytic: molann sé means "he praises" and *molann without an explicit subject is ungrammatical (except in tag questions and as an answer to a question). So what's weird about Irish compared to "canonical" null-subject languages like Portuguese is (1) not all finite verb forms carry person and number information, and those that don't may not have a null subject, and (2) verb forms that do carry person and number information must have a null subject; it isn't optional. — An gr 11:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Mentioning a few diverse null subject languages in the article serves two purposes: (A) to give the reader for who this is a new concept a few examples they might be familiar with; and (B) to illustrate that this feature occurs in widely divergent language families. There are some 2000 null subject languages, and it is pointless to list here as many as possible. Additionally, there is a serious problem of unverifiability. If some user adds, say, Cotoname, who is going to verify this, or, alternatively, challenge this? So I propose to whittle and keep the list down to, say, ten widely known (if only by name) diverse languages. Other viewpoints? -- Lambiam Talk 00:54, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Bah! If you want to have such a cut, you should name language families, and not languages. Velho 04:11, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
I've replaced the text in the article by Ruakh's text, but instead of the absolute number 2000 (which is an undocumented estimate) I've put the vague but unassailable "a considerable part" (of the world's languages). -- Lambiam Talk 04:55, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Why shouldn't we mention that imperative sentences often come without subject?! Velho 23:34, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I've corrected the section which said that the construction "ele está a chover" doesn't exist in portuguese based on: [1] and [2](both links are in portuguese) -- LeRobert 18:06, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
One of those links referred to a very famous Portuguese song. All I wanted to show was that it's perfectly fine to use that construction even if it's not a very common one (maybe that sentence is not a very good example for this article). -- LeRobert 10:57, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
You only very rarely hear that in Portuguese. It's either done for literary purposes, or (perhaps) characteristic of a few dialects. I think it's fair to say that it's not a part of the standard language, and I would not count it as a counterexample, myself. There is no comparison between those examples and English "It rains" or French "Il pleut", where the pronoun is absolutely mandatory. FilipeS 19:34, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
But c'mon! The article shouldn't point to the possibility of "ele" appearing. It looks now as if it was kind of an option or so. Whenever "ele" appears in such constructions, it is always somehow non-standard or even anti-standard. The article isn't giving the right idea! Velho 02:01, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Hear! Hear! -- LeRobert 13:40, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
I've never ever met 'ele está a chover', or actually any instance of 'ele' as the subject of an otherwise impersonal construction in my lifetime as a native speaker and careful observer of the language. There is only 'Ele acontece.../há...' as a fixed expression. I'm willing to admit it might occur in dialectal or archaic usage, of the sort that nobody will ever meet in normal life. The song mentioned uses the fixed and normal, albeit stilted, 'ele há'. 77.54.70.64 ( talk) 17:47, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I am Brazilian and thus a native speaker of Portuguese. I would like to point out that according to Portuguese grammar, the second example (with "It is raining") is not exactly a case of omitted subject, and therefore may not be a case of null subject as defined here. Additionally, there is a good and precise reason why the subject may be omitted in the first example (with "I am going home").
In the first example, "Vou para casa" ("I am going home" - or, literally, "[I] go to [my] house" - there are actually two omitted pronouns in this sentence, one personal and one possessive!), it is simply the very detailed and precise Portuguese verb conjugation, mostly with a different verb form for each person, number and tense combination, that makes the pronoun implicit and redundant.
In other words, there is no way a pronoun other than eu ("I") could be used with vou; so, there is no gain in information content by using the pronoun explicitly (or loss by not using it). Both forms are grammatically correct and it is usually left to the speaker's or writer's preference to use either of them. However, as mentioned in the text, Brazilian Portuguese is indeed more liberal with using explicit pronouns or not than European Portuguese, where emphasis considerations weigh more (here in Brazil, we not only use the pronoun for emphasis, but must use the right voice tone when emphasis is desired - that is, the emphasis itself must be emphasized!). For this very reason, we are taught in school that it is considered more elegant to avoid using explicit subjects whenever possible, especially with eu, because saying "eu, eu, eu" all the time can be interpreted as a sign that the person is a total egocentric...
On the other hand, there are some verbs and tenses where the first and third person singular are conjugated the same way. The same very irregular verb ir ("to go") offers an example in the so-called imperfect past tense: "Eu ia à igreja" ("I used to go to church") and "Ele/ela ia à igreja" ("He/she used to go to church"). In such cases, the speaker or writer is advised to check if there are enough context clues before deciding whether to use an explicit subject or not, because otherwise there may be room for ambiguity sometimes.
However, chover ("to rain") is a completely different case. It is not a case where the subject may be omitted because it is already implicit: chover and other "weather" verbs are a special case of so-called "impersonal defective" verbs, and in their commonest usage (as in "It is raining" - "Está chovendo" in Brazil or "Está a chover" in Portugal), they are only conjugated in the third person singular and syntactically are considered to have no subject at all. That is, the subject is not being omitted - Portuguese grammar considers that it simply does not exist! (There are, however, figurative constructions which may have a subject, and then the verb will be conjugated accordingly; the prestigious Houaiss dictionary gives some examples, such as: "Após o apelo na TV, os donativos choveram." - "After the appeal on TV, donations rained.") With that in mind, is the basic sense of chover a null-subject example as defined by this article? I am not so sure.
I am not very proficient in Spanish, but the two languages are very similar, including much of their grammar, and I believe these same remarks probably apply to Spanish as well (including the case of llover - "to rain").
What do you think? -- UrsoBR ( talk) 11:01, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
Here and in other linguistics articles, constructed languages are over-represented. That a given constructed language has a given characteristic is really irrelevant for most purposes, because it doesn't say anything meaningful about the characteristic (all it says is that the language's constructor thought it a good idea). That said, I feel awkward about removing this content without some sort of discussion first … so, thoughts? — Ruakh TALK 21:16, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I reintroduced part of that section, for the following reasons. First, the section was nearly blanked. I can see devoting less space to one language type than another, but I see no reason to single out one type and nearly obliterate it. Second, the information was removed under the misunderstanding that this section deals with constructed languages and is therefore not meaningful. While Esperanto is considered constructed, Interlingua is considered a naturally occurring language, so it isn't clear to me how it is somehow less meaningful than French or Japanese. In any case, I think it's a big leap from "constructed" to "meaningless", and it seems an overstatement to suggest that including one constructed language is an over-representation. Finally, several officially null-subject languages are included, just not in the auxiliary language section. I've made this clearer in the text. Cal ( talk) 06:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
There is something I want to clarify before I write sections on Hebrew and Arabic. In null subject languages, is it necessary or just optional to omit the subject? I need to know this to finish my section on Hebrew. -- Vgp0012 17:56, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
We need a List of null-subject languages as well as a List of non-null-subject languages. Openodd ( talk) 03:33, 20 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm removing the parenthetical addition from 94.225.100.28 on 30 September, 2011
Since the rest of the article considers verb conjugation to be perfectly compatible with classifying an example as Null-subject, even typical. 94.225.100.28's interpretation makes sense, but doesn't fit with the rest of the article. Aidan ( talk) 19:23, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
What does this bit mean?
There are some words missing, and I'm reading this as
-- which makes no sense. SigPig | SEND - OVER 05:36, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
I do not understand the concept of 'null subject' as explained here at all. In a form such as 'tulissem' it is surely the final grapheme/morpheme that carries the 'subject' information and is every bit as explicit as 'ego', which is quite simply made redundant and need not be added but can be added in some cases for particular effect. In languages where the pronoun information is usually explicitly required, the omission of it (Weiss nicht/Don't know) is possible because the context ensures that it is understood ( Pamour ( talk) 20:35, 24 October 2016 (UTC)).
Taken in account that the text is almost the same those sections could be together. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.123.118.0 ( talk) 21:10, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
“Radical pro-drop is possible only in NP languages.”
What is an NP language? I've searched the Wikipedia and failed. I see a lot of examples about "NP-completeness" in mathematics and computation; they obviously are not relevant. The only linguistic example I find is NP as an abbreviation of "noun phrase" but I can't make sense of that either in this context. — Tonymec ( talk) 14:10, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
In Turkish it is not actually possible to omit the subject. Because the language do extensively make use of possessive suffixes. So you will never ever have to "guess" the subject... [1].
References